Life kicks you when you're down
Ever have those moments where you think life would be easier if you just didn't care about anything you did, but you know that it would actually be worse?
My dad - sitting less than ten feet away, blissfully unaware of anything outside what he deems important - is a dick.
My dad has been moving my family around for my entire life. He's screwed up any kind of ability I might have had to emotionally connect to other people, which just means that I'm angry all the time. I live my life afraid of people and new experiences because at any moment, I may have to pack up and leave everything and everyone behind.
That's been my life. My entire life.
Finally we get to Washington.
And DAD says those blessed words, 'we'll never have to move again'.
We throw out all the boxes.
We buy a house.
I go to a High School for all three years without any interruptions, school or teacher changes.
I make friends.
A bunch of them.
Dad retires from the military and gets a desk job.
Last month he says there's directorships opening up, and he's applying for them.
The only thing is, none of them are in Washington.
I don't want to leave, so I arrange with a friend of mine to sleep on his couch till I can get a job and find my own apartment. Except that I'm not comfortable with that because I've never been on my own in my life except for once, when mom and dad went to Iraq, but even then it was our house that I was living alone in.
So when mom intimates that if we move, dad will pay for my college, I jump on that like a freakin life raft.
Course, dad could've told me, but I can't remember the last time my father and I had a conversation that didn't start and end with him insulting me or giving me an order to clean up his house.
And I'm not the only one who's suffering for his self-absorbed reality.
A few weeks ago - despite the possibility of leaving the state, which would entail many strange people coming into our house and putting everything in boxes without knowing or caring what happens to them - my father called mom from the casino and told her that a group of strange people were going to come to the house to wall mount a flat screen television in his room, which means that she has to clean it.
And she does. She busts her ass all day cleaning their room, while he sits on his ass all day and plays cards. She gets done and he calls at about seven o'clock, she tells him that she cleaned their room, and my father asks - without having seen the room, still sitting on his ass a couple miles away - 'Did you dust?'
Yeah, she asked me to make her a brandy and coke.
It was the first time I'd ever seen her drink because she was angry or sad.
Dad got a blu-ray, even though blu-ray discs only work in blu ray machines. HE got Iron Man and Hulk (two of the best comic movies I've ever seen) on blu-ray, so now there's only two dvd players I can watch those movies on. The big one downstairs, where I can't relax because they can find me and tell me what to do or his room. Great. Thanks, dad.
Blu-ray.
He got a BLU-RAY player for our HDTV.
HE GOT A MACHINE THAT PLAYS A MOVIE IN HIGH DEFINITION FOR A TELEVISION THAT ALREADY DOES THAT.
Jesus Christ!
Meanwhile, I have to prepare for the possibility that I might leave everything and everyone I love behind because my dad had to grow an ambition. Well that's not true, he's always had this ambition. He needs to be in control. If he's not the boss, he's not happy.
Which would explain why he acts like the lord of a castle and treats us like his serfs.
Jerk.